In a related network protocol processing system, pipeline processing is realized by a plurality of protocol processing sections. The related network protocol processing system contains sub processors for implementing the plurality of protocol processing sections, a first recording medium for storing protocol control data, and a second recording medium which can be accessed at a speed higher than the first recording medium. A first protocol processing section issues an instruction to read protocol data from the first recording medium to store in the second recording medium or to newly generate the protocol control data to store in the second recording medium. Also, a second protocol processing section refers to the protocol control data stored in the second recording medium to carries out protocol processing. The first protocol processing section carries out processing at a former stage than the second protocol processing section. Thus, a pipeline operation is realized.
However, the related network protocol processing system has the following problems.
The first problem lies in that the related network protocol processing system cannot realize asynchronous parallel processing between a transmission processing block and a reception processing block in the protocol processing. The reason is in that as an amount of control data transferred between the plurality of protocol processing sections, only one entry is prepared for each session.
The second problem lies in that even if a single queue is provided to store the control data transferred between the transmission processing block and the reception processing block in order to solve the first problem, the use of only the single queue degrades the performance of a session opening/closing processing during a data transmission/reception processing in a network. The reason is in that when all of the control data transferred between the transmission processing blocks and between the reception processing blocks pass through the same queue, the control data related to the session opening/closing processing between the transmission processing block and the reception processing block is influenced by control data transferred through packet processing.
The third problem lies in that data transfer performance of the session for a network protocol with a high priority level cannot be improved. The reason is in that a priority control for each session in the network protocol processing is not considered.
As a related technique, Japanese Patent Publication (JP 2008-146486A: Patent Literature 1) discloses a communication apparatus, a control method of a communication apparatus, and a program. In this related technique, a hierarchical protocol stack such as TCP/IP is processed in a pipeline manner by a plurality of processors.
Also, Japanese Patent Publication (JP 2007-166294A) (Patent Literature 2) discloses a packet transferring apparatus and a multicast expanding method. In this related technique, pointer data and priority data are distributed into either one of a low priority queue and a high priority queue in accordance with a specified priority.